Ran some PvP on my level 69 Warrior tonight – EotS twice, had a lot of fun. One decisive win, one close loss. Flipped over to Cynwise, EotS again, 3-1 victory, okay. Experimented with different places to put her circle around MT, there’s probably a post in there somewhere.

Started to get a little late, Tol Barad was about to pop, figured I’d queue up for it and maybe eke out a nice chunk of honor.

In the words of the immortal sage of Star Wars, whassa meesa thinking?

ICG. Fight, rout the Horde, move to Slags. Entire Horde team is at Slags. Get killed, try to draw them out, get killed again. Move on to the East Spire, watch a demo take out the spire.

Getting more tired. Go to WV, I like WV. Good places to put your circle in WV. (Also, not 20 Horde to 1 Alliance.) Take WV. Yay WV! Lose ICG. Boo ICG!

Take ICG back. Lose WV. Yawn a few times.

Poke at Slags. Get a few Horde to follow me out. Kill a few, get killed by the rest.

Rez at ICG. God damn, this is boring. West Spire down. 40 Honor, but now there’s more time on this clock. Damn clock. Wintergrasp was never like this.

Go to WV. Die defending WV from a massive inc. No chance. Infernal bought some nice time, but I couldn’t take out the healers because their rogues were protecting them. WHAT WHAT you heard me right.

Rezzing.

Why is this so boring? Thoughts wandering. Wintergrasp wasn’t this boring.

Why is this so boring? I can’t shake that thought. I buff up, but don’t move. Why?

TB Attackers have one task, to be repeated in three locations. Take this base, this base, or this base. They’re all the same layout, with some minor variations of internal layout. Three people can go get demos and knock down towers, but that’s it.

TB Defenders have one task, to be repeated in three locations. Ride, stay, fight, repeat.

Wintergrasp gave you several choices right off the bat.

Attackers: take workshops, kill npcs, assault the walls on foot, defend south towers, defend south workshops, build vehicles, assault walls. That’s just deciding what you want to do in the first two minutes.

Defenders: man the walls, or go south for the towers? Ride out to stop siege massing at SR/BT? Get in a cannon on the walls?

If you wanted individual PvP, go south to the towers. Or go to the workshops. Less comfortable with it? Stick with the groups in the courtyards.

Choices. Lots of choices. Different activities. Keep, workshops, or towers?

Towers.

WG towers mattered. If you got them down you could WIN. Not give you a chance to win, you could end the game with a victory by taking all the time off the clock. Defending the towers could give you time to win, and failure to do so meant you could actively lose.

TB towers prolong the game. They give you more time to win, more chances to flip the bases, but they don’t actively win the game. They don’t matter. Why do defenders ignore them? They don’t really matter.

Why is Tol Barad boring, while Wintergrasp was exciting?

Because doing the same thing over and over again in different locations is boring.

Doing different things in different locations is not.

Choices. That’s why Wintergrasp was so cool – it offered choices.

Final spire goes down. Total time on clock jumps up to 14 minutes. We’d lost WV but gotten ICG back.

3 responses to “On Tol Barad’s Failure to be as Cool as Wintergrasp”

My god, SO MUCH THIS. I don’t even really enjoy PVP as a spriest, but I still showed up for every WG battle I could because it was FUN. TB is just soooooo booooooriiiiiing. Zerg node. Take node. Lose second node. Zerg third node. Take node. Lose first node. Zerg second node. sdkfja;ljs;dfklj KILL MEEEEEE

Playing TB for me sometimes feels like putting quarters in a slot machine. Every time you take a base it’s like pulling a lever. Hopefully you get ICG, WV and Slag to line up and you win the jackpot. Taking a tower is like winning a mini jackpot to keep you playing a little longer. I don’t like playing slot machines.In Wintergrasp there are indicators of how much progress you have made and what you need to accomplish to turn it around and win. I realize that there are indicators in every BG of what you need to do to win but some do a better job than others. Maybe I just prefer the simple BG’s. Warsong Gulch for me is the hands down favorite by a mile.Effective use of Demonic Circle is one of my biggest weaknesses in PvP. That would be a very welcome read.

Wintergrasp also had the weeklies, that had in-battle goals you could work on. Even someone who loathed pvp, or someone on a super unbalanced server, could work on quests by killing NPCs or toppling towers. (My server had literally about 10 alliance total that would queue for wintergrasp by 2010. We had to dual to destroy demolishers for quests. I have no idea what TB must be like on Mal’Ganis.) It had things you could do that weren’t zerg res zerg die die zerg run slotmachine play.

About CWM

Cynwise's Warcraft Manual is a weblog about many facets of the World of Warcraft: PvP battlegrounds, digital avatars, warlock theory, and having fun with alternate play styles are common topics.